Knowledge Base Example

The S-AI-L (Simulated, Adventure-Inspired, Learning) model of Instructional Design, has 3 major components:

The Simulator,
The Learning Module
The Knowledge Base

This is an example of what a knowledge base could look like. You can build it with any Blogging tool, Wiki, CMS (like Mambo, Joomla or Drupal), Google Pages – or any other tool you feel comfortable creating websites with.

You include in the knowledge base any kind of information source that you feel the user might need when making an educated decision. This is where formal learning comes in. Here you will include the curricular content you present to the user, only in this model, the need for that knowledge, generated by the simulator and the Learning Module, is assumed to engage the students into a meaningful learning process as they need to utilize that knowledge in order to perform better in the simulator.

Once the knowledge base is ready to include in the story, copy the URL into the Author and create a HotSpot where you feel the students might need it.

This example is embedded into the KnoWorld Public High-School story’s first scene.

The scene presents a science lab holodeck set and the story is about “snitching” – a girl is tell-telling about a group of her classmates who had built a “stink bomb”.

This knowledge base is made available to the students “playing” the story, when they role-play a team including a teacher; a principal, a parent and a school counselor.

Here is the link to “Snitching“.

When the user clicks on a hotspot that link to a knowledge base, the internatl browser of Second Life opens like this:

The internal browser is visible to the user and not to the whole team (unlike all other objects and sets in SL). This gives each student the freedom to research the knowledge base and explore his own interests while preparing an argument for the team’s discussion.

The internal browser is limited as it cannot present video files and some scripts. It has an option to open the site in the external Internet browser, so none of the information need to be missed. I prefere the internal browser, it seems to feel more inworld.